A case of mistaken identity

An adorable creature was assumed to be something else for more than 100 years, but what is the significance of this revelation?

Likened to a house cat and teddy bear hybrid, Olinguito (rhymes with mojito) is a most adorable new kid on the block. Actually a member of the racoon family (Procyondiae), the mysterious critter was, until very recently, totally unknown to science – hidden away in a drawer of museum junk.

In addition to being unbearably cute, olinguito’s discovery is really rather important – It is the first carnivore (it belongs to the order Carnivora) to be discovered in the Western hemisphere for 35 years.

Though it had been observed in the wild, tucked away in museum collections and even exhibited in zoos, the fig-loving olinguito - formal name Bassaricyon neblina - was a victim of mistaken identity for more than 100 years. But how did it escape detection for so long?

The journey to discovery started a decade ago when curator of mammals at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, Kristofer Helgen attempted the first comprehensive study of olingos – tree-living carnivores that are aesthetically similar to olinguitos. Examining museum specimens collected in the early 20th century, he came across a pelt that had been labelled “olingo”, despite being a reddish colour rather than the more usual grey. It was this pelt that spurred Helgen on a quest to learn more about the animal from which it had come. After travelling to 18 other museums, enlisting the help of various experts, and examining the majority of the world’s olingo specimens, he found further vast differences between the olinguito and the olingo, such as a different skull and smaller teeth.

Field records suggested it lived in a unique area of the northern Andres Mountains at elevations much higher than the known species of olingo would occupy. So Helgen wanted to know: was this creature really a new species, and did it still exist in the wild? Years after finding the original pelt, he trekked off to the Andean forests to find out.

After some sneaky placing of video cameras, Helgen and his team were lucky enough to find the olinguitos in a forest on the western slopes of the Andres, and spent their trip documenting everything they could about the animal before obtaining a DNA sample to analyse in the laboratory back home. They realised that the wide-eyed fluffball is mainly nocturnal, and is usually completely covered by the ‘cloud’ canopies, perhaps explaining why it had escaped discovery for so long.

The olinguito’s reveal is even more unlikely when you consider that 10,000 species go extinct every year due to human impact. The creature’s forest habitat is under particularly heavy pressure from human development – Helgen and his team estimate that 42% of historical olinguito habitat has already been converted to agriculture or urban areas.

When the team got back to the lab, DNA analysis between olingo and olinguito samples revealed what I think is the most stunning part of the story – they only had 90% of their DNA in common. That’s far more genetically distinct than the researchers could ever have imagined. Put that in perspective by remembering that we have 99% genome similarity with chimps, and it’s estimated that we actually have 90% similarity to the house cat that looks not too unlike the olinguito itself. What really caught my attention was reading that a rare-spotted female olinguito was moved around a number of zoos in the 1960s because frustrated zookeepers couldn’t understand why it wouldn’t breed with its olingo roommates. They assumed the olinguito was just playing hard to get, but breeding would have been a total impossibility.

Clearly, the olinguito’s discovery indicates that we have much more to discover about the world. And it just goes to show that now our scientific toolbox is expanding with molecular biology techniques that allow sharper methods of identification than ever seen before, what constitutes a new species for scientists today is very different to what taxonomists even a few decades ago would have concluded from their more limited methods. Looks can be deceiving. So it prompts the question: Are there other creatures that have been previously overlooked?

While we should certainly be concerned about what impact humans will have on the future of some species, the good news is that olinguito’s discovery suggests that all kind of weird and wonderful creatures could be lurking in dusty museum drawers, just waiting to be revealed. And the sooner we discover these new critters, and draw attention to them, the sooner we can apply conservation methods. Taxonomy’s future could very well lie in marrying the old (museum exhibits) with the new (molecular biology) to uncover the mysteries of what really roams our planet.